Jerome Foxworthy

Jerome is the book's narrator and its protagonist. In his early to mid-teens at the time the narrative is set (in the early 1970's - see "Style - Setting"), African-American Jerome undergoes a two tier coming-of-age process over the course of the narrative. On one level, he is undergoing a journey of transformation as a black man, full of self-confidence and self-awareness, developed in a primary blacks-only context, that is challenged by his entering into a whites-only school. There, he encounters racism-defined challenges to his sense of self that to some degree frustrate him but to a greater degree make him more determined than ever to claim and sustain his sense of personal identity. On another level, he undergoes a journey of transformation as a human being, discovering two main things. The first is that his ideal of friendship, or more particularly best friend-ship, is not necessarily...